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Team HRC is the factory Honda outfit in the FIM Motocross World Championship, known as MXGP. After more than 20 years away from the sport, the HRC name reappeared alongside the Martin Honda squad in 2014 with an ambitious plan – to win the MXGP World Championship in three years.

They didn’t do it. Rather, they didn’t just do it. It took just two years to win the MX2 World Championship with Tim Gajser in 2015, and the young Slovenian stepped immediately into the MXGP class in 2016 and enjoyed the most dominant performance of his career to take back-to-back world titles with HRC. Mission completed.

Three years later, Gajser would put in an even more impressive season as he wrapped up his second MXGP world championship three rounds early in emotional scenes at the Imola race track. During the season he won a record-breaking seven rounds in a row and ended up with a 202 point gap over second place. If he wasn’t already, Gajser was writing himself into Honda’s history books.

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The Martin Honda team was the precursor to Team HRC, and was originally formed in the 1980’s by Paolo Martin and his brother. In 2011 the squad was renamed the Honda World Motocross team, a reflection of the Japanese marque’s increasing presence in the sport, with their focus on the 450cc larger-capacity class, but always retaining a role developing the 250cc machines.

The Gariboldi Racing team joined the Honda stable in 2014 with a young hopeful (with many European titles already to his name) called Tim Gajser. After a learning year in 2014, Gajser’s first full season in MX2, 2015 was a breakthrough season for both Tim and the team with their first MX2 World Championship title, and the first for Honda since 2000. The Slovenian’s rise was then meteoric as he lined-up behind the gate on the CRF450RW for the 2016 season and had a blistering run to become the first back-to-back World Champion of the MXGP and MX2 era.

These titles evoke memories of HRC’s golden era, when Honda sealed a raft of 125, 250 and 500 MX world titles in a period of domination that started with Graham Noyce’s 500cc title in 1979 and was continued into the 1980s with the likes of Andre Malherbe, Dave Thorpe, Eric Geboers, Georges Jobe and Jean-Michel Bayle to name a few.

Indeed, 12 500cc World Titles were delivered on Honda machinery between 1979 and 1992, including nine in a row from 1984 and podium clean-sweeps in 1985, 1986 and 1989, and a further five titles in the 250cc and 125cc classes in the same period.

Towards the end of the 2016 season, Evgeny Bobryshev and then also Tim Gajser became the first to campaign the all-new 2017 CRF450RW, totally redesigned by Honda based upon the very dominance in MXGP that marked the CRF as the weapon of choice when the going gets rough. In 2018, Calvin Vlaanderen will become the first rider to campaign the all-new works CRF250RW in the highly-competitive MX2 category.

In the 2018 season, the Honda Gariboldi Racing squad, with whom Honda won both the 2015 MX2 and 2016 MXGP World Championship titles, ran both the CRF450RW and CRF250RW entries for Team HRC with Tim Gajser and Brian Bogers running in the MXGP class while Calvin Vlaanderen joined the team to race in the 250cc MX2 class. After injuries meant that Todd Waters replaced Brian Bogers for a large portion of the season, the original 2018 trio returns again in 2019 to challenge for both world championship titles.

A year later and HRC would return to the winners circle, with Gajser wrapping up his third world championship title in dominant fashion as he took the championship three and half rounds early. The Slovenian rider would win seven rounds in a row in the middle stages of the season and moved up to 24 GP overalls, joint-second in the Honda wins list with legend Stefan Everts. He would also win the ‘hardest race in the world’ at the treacherous Lommel facility, further showing just how much he had improved his riding and also how well he had gelled with the Honda CRF450RW. It was a record-breaking season and one that takes him into 2020 full of confidence.